The Freedmen’s Bureau: The Promise and the Reality

Hello, and welcome to Political Realignment. I'm Hank Wilson. In our last episode, we stood with America at the end of the Civil War and asked a deceptively simple question: How do you rebuild a nation after it has been divided against itself? But there was another question—one that was perhaps even more difficult. Nearly four million people who had once been enslaved were now free. But what did freedom actually mean? It is easy, looking backward, to think of emancipation as an ending. Slavery had been abolished. The enslaved were free. But for the people actually living through 1865, emancipation wasn't simply an ending. It was a beginning. People who had previously been considered property were suddenly expected to participate in an economic and political system that had spent generations excluding them. Many had little formal education. Most owned no land. Many had no money. Families had been separated. And throughout much of the South, the people who had controlled the land, the economy, and local government before the war were still there. Freedom had arrived. But almost none of the institutions necessary to make that freedom meaningful had arrived with it. Congress attempted to address that problem through an organization commonly known as the Freedmen's Bureau. Its formal name was the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands. Created in March of 1865, the Bureau was given an extraordinary assignment. It provided food, clothing, and medical assistance. It helped establish schools. It supervised labor agreements. It assisted families separated during slavery and the war. It became involved in disputes involving freedpeople and attempted to provide some measure of legal protection. Those were ambitious goals. And they were, in many respects, admirable ones. But there was an enormous difference between declaring what an agency should accomplish... and giving that agency the ability to accomplish it. To understand that difference, let's leave Washington for a moment. Let's go to Virginia. Thomas P. Jackson Thomas P. Jackson was an English immigrant working as an agent of the Freedmen's Bureau in Virginia. And Jackson's reports provide us with something extraordinarily valuable. They allow us to watch Reconstruction happening on the ground. Not through the speeches of presidents. Not through debates in Congress. But through the reports of a man trying to make the new system actually work. Consider something as basic as medical care. A local physician, Dr. S. C. Harris, had been providing medical services to freedpeople in Jackson's area. But medicine costs money. Doctors have to make a living. And good intentions don't pay for medical supplies. In May of 1867, Jackson wrote to his superior asking the government to provide money so Harris could continue his work. The amount he requested? Twenty-five dollars a month. Jackson wrote that there were people suffering from illnesses, including typhoid fever, and asked for the appropriation on their behalf. Twenty-five dollars. One month later, Jackson wrote again. Dr. Harris could no longer afford to continue providing both his services and medicine without sufficient compensation. Think about what that tells us. The federal government had created an agency charged, among other things, with assisting the medical needs of a population emerging from slavery and war. An agent found a doctor willing to do the work. And the system still struggled to provide enough resources to keep him doing it. Medical care wasn't the only problem. Freedom and Work For generations, the Southern agricultural economy had depended upon enslaved labor. Now that labor had to become something entirely different. Free labor. Employers and workers would negotiate. Contracts would be created. Workers would be paid. At least, that was the idea. Once again, Jackson's reports show us what happened when the idea encountered reality. In September of 1867, he reported that many employers were not treating their workers fairly. The problem became particularly obvious when the agricultural season ended and it was time to settle accounts. Workers who believed they were owed wages discovered that the agreements they thought protected them didn't necessarily provide much protection at all. Some received goods or credit rather than the money their agreements called for. Jackson asked one of the obvious questions. Why accept goods when the contract said you were supposed to receive money? The answer tells us more about the economic reality of Reconstruction than almost any government report could. The workers told him, essentially: We couldn't get the money, and our families had to eat and be clothed. There is an important distinction here. These people were free. But freedom and econ